Olga de Soto “A Project Made of Voices”. Bulegoa z/b Residency Programme

Residency 1: 8 – 12 May 2017 – Azala, espacio de creación (Lasierra)

Bulegoa z/b is setting up a new residency programme to support artistic production and knowledge at different phases and levels.

Our guest for 2017 is choreographer Olga de Soto, who is invited to develop her work A Project Made of Voices and to recuperate the sound material gathered during her research on dance history.

De Soto has been offered two periods of residency. Her first stay will take place from 8 – 12 May at Azala, a space for creation in Lasierra, a village in Álava, and will be combined with a seminar and screening organized by Azala as part of Proklama#10. The second phase of the residency will be hosted at Bulegoa z/b, Bilbao, through the autumn, to culminate in a public presentation of the project.

A Project Made of Voices came out of Olga de Soto’s last few years’ work. Based on a work first staged in 1932, the project oscillates between the analysis of bodily memory, her research on the history of dance, and the study of perceptive memory.

Beginning with a large sound archive built up over several years and bringing together numerous interviews in French, English, Spanish and German, the aim of A Project Made of Voices is to explore forms that will facilitate in-depth exploration of oral documentation through choreography, focusing on themes such as the imprint, echoes, resonance and sediment.

De Soto follows two lines of exploration in this project. Firstly, the question of meaning and sense in imagining a documentary object; and secondly, the voice as physical matter, with the aim of creating a distance from the meaning of discourses and narratives in order to play with words, language and languages, accents, tones, intonation and intention, and find ways in to the conception of an abstract object.

Olga de Soto is a choreographer and dance researcher. She was born in Valencia and lives in Brussels. She obtained a degree at the Angers National Centre for Contemporary Dance, after having studied classical and contemporary dance and music in Valencia and Madrid.

Her creative trajectory began in 1992, and since the year 2000 she has been focusing on the study of memory and the impact, use and perpetuity of the performing arts, following two different lines of research: the study of bodily memory; and the History of Dance through the memory and perception of certain works as these are held by spectators of them and also the dancers who have interpreted them, which has led to de Soto generating and building up an archive of numerous text, iconographic, oral and audiovisual documents.

De Soto’s work has been seen in around twenty countries. She is regularly invited to hold talks and workshops at different universities and to share her methodology. In 2013 she was awarded the SACD Prize by the Belgian Society of Dramatic Authors and Composers in the Performing Arts category for the trajectory of her work, particularly her research and creation around Kurt Jooss’ The Green Table.

This activity will be held in collaboration with Azala, espacio de creación.